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Friday, 8 April 2005

Death of Patents is a new collection of essays in the Perspectives on Intellectual Property Law and Policy series, published by Lawtext Publishing Ltd for the Queen Mary Intellectual Property Research Institute. Edited by Australian scholar and former QM Herchel Smith Senior Research Fellow Peter Drahos, this collection of essays is quite provocative and demands of its readers that they keep an open mind while reading some material that they may find profoundly detrimental to their preconceived notions. On sale at £35, the book's contents are as follows:

Chapter 1 - Death of a Patent System - IntroductionPeter Drahos, Australian National University, Canberra

Chapter 2 - Schrodinger's Cat: An Observation on Modern Patent LawDr Margaret Llewelyn, Reader in Intellectual Property Law, and Deputy Director, Sheffield Institute for Biotechnology Law and Ethics (SIBLE), University of Sheffield

Chapter 5 - Shifts in India's Policy on Intellectual Property: The Role of Ideas, Coercion and Changing InterestsAnitha Ramanna, Lecturer at the Department of Politics and Public Administration, University of Pune, India

Chapter 6 - The Ethics of Patenting - Uneasy JustificationsSigrid Sterckx, Senior Lecturer Research Fellow, Ghent University and Part time Professor, University of Antwerp

Chapter 7 - Legal and Ethical Aspects of Bio-Patenting: Critical Analysis of EU Biotechnology DirectiveGeertui Van Overwalle, Dr. Iur; Professor of Law at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven and at the Universite de Liege

Chapter 8 - Is the World Ready for Substantive Patent Law Harmonisation? A lesson from HistoryGraham Dutfield, Herchel Smith Senior Research Fellow at Queen Mary Intellectual Property Institute

The IPKat says you can really enjoy this little book. It shows how dangerously blinkered (though not necessarily wrong) a traditional patent lawyer's view of the patent system can be. Merpel adds, "I don't understand. If patent systems are dying, how come everyone seems to be making so much use of them and they're more popular than ever?". "In that case", says the IPKat, "do any of our readers fancy getting involved in a new collection of essays called Life of Patents? If so, let him know.

29 comments:

Maurice McCarthy
said...

Superb. How very timely since that is exactly what is at issue. With the information age the conditions of society have changed so that what worked in the mechanical age is not longer appropriate. Patent is damaging to software innovation.

This is so because it is the essence of a technology and not technology as such. It is a form of knowledge. Alan Cox calls it a speech form. Manuel Castells calls it the language of the information age. It is the world medium for the foreseeable future.

Suppose Isaac Newton copyrighted the law of gravity. Would he get a patent on it because of the greater technical effect?

In software the difference between technology and the idea behind it has been abolished. It does not exist therefore to patent it would be to patent knowledge as such. The cultural concession is completely unacceptable.

You can buy it from the publisher, Lawtext. This link http://www.lawtext.com/lawtextweb/default.jsp?PageID=12&PublicationID=11&order=1should lead you through to an order form that is configured to enable you to purchase one copy of Death of Patents.

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Gama and Pal: is the wet-wipe packaging confusingly similar?

Yesterday morning the IPKat posted this item on an ongoing passing-off action, Gama Healthcare Ltd v Pal International Ltd. in which Gama objected that Pal's wet-wipe packaging would lead people to think it was theirs.

When that Katpost went live, there were no examples of the parties’ packaging to show readers. The Kats have since received images of both, which they reproduce below, and they ask readers, through the medium of the sidebar poll below, if they think that Pal's packaging might be mistaken for Gama’s one.

Pal's packs are sold under the Medipal brand and Gama's are sold as Clinell products.

Caveat: this poll is conducted purely for the amusement of readers of this weblog. It is not mandated by the trial judge or commissioned by either party; it is not based on any methodology and it is not intended to have any evidential value at all.

Wet-wipe packaging: do you think you could pick up a packet of Medipal, thinking it was Clinell?

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